First night and morning

....woke up this morning before sunrise and thought: wow this is bright (I mean the daylight or twilight).

For some reason I expected a grey and deppressing day, but here in Kiruna its already 3 hours daytime (you can check www.timeanddate.com for your place of interest) and its extremely beautiful as the sun stays so close to the horizon (about 1°) - its amazing. I measured illuminance to be 950 lx during midday. Still most people and the town leave the lights on almost the entire day.

Also during the night all the lights are on everywhere. Lamps that illuminate footpaths that are buried under 3 m of snow stay on all night. I understand there is a demand for light under these circumstances (polar night, slippery roads) but smart technology with dimming and on-demand light can help a lot (see article with video about street lights in Norway).

So what did I do last night. Mounted the SQM on the roof of the car and drove around at night to measure with the roadrunner system.

The ice-road runner SQM

Weather was clear with few high altitude clouds. Sometimes there was (icy?) fog. I wanted to map the skyglow (see work by Jaime Zamorana et al. of Madrid). Of course there were the usual technical problems: GPS not working, SQM housing was freezing in when driving through that ice fog.

The hunt for darkness was (expectedly near Kiruna) not very successfull. Lowest sky brightness was 20.6 driving the E10 south-eastwards (after the town Svappavaara) and 21.3 driving the E10 towards the North-East (between Torneträsk and Rensjön villages). Besides the clouds, there was some airglow present.

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An important tool is the SQM roadrunner system. The Sky Quality Meter "SQM" by the Canadian manufacturer Unihedron is a small photometer that measures the night sky brightness. It has become the most widespread device for world-wide light pollution studies. You can get a handheld SQM and participate by uploading your data to websites like Globe at Night.

The roadrunner system links an SQM (LU version) with a GPS - so you can move around and automatically track your position and the sky brightness. One can use any vehicle for that, researchers used cars or bicycles.

The obstacles were driver installation, that the software (infos in this pdf) is in Spanish and the mounting. As I do not know the car I simply used a standard SQM housing and attached it to a base I found in my garage using tools I found in the garage ;)

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Well that's very anoying. Luckily room has a 3 person bunk bed so I can use the sheets to cover the window.

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So I went to sleep a bit as the last night was really exhausting. Set the alarm to 10pm. Got up same fog soup 😠.

Well I am here to do measurements at all weather conditions so I jumped in the car and drove through that soup. I expected it to be pitch bl…